Making “It,” Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel about an alien killer clown who feasts on the fears of children in Derry, Maine, every 27 years, into a feature film was itself a frightening proposition.

One worry was how to wrangle the 1,100-plus-pages book into a standard-length movie. It was decided to toss the tale’s parallel storylines, in which a local group of outcasts called the Loser’s Club battle the evil bozo Pennywise both when they hit puberty and again as adults pushing 40, in favor of just focusing this hopefully first entry in the franchise on the kids’ part of the story.

But then another scary decision: make this clearly younger-skewing adaptation a target audience-friendly PG-13 affair or stay faithful to King’s disturbing visions? The movie is rated R, with its gruesome opening scene intact.

“It’s hard to imagine a PG-13 version of ‘It,’ ” acknowledges the film’s director, Andy Muschietti. “The spirit of the book is important, and much of that spirit has to do with the intensity and violence. Besides, there already was a PG-13 kind of version, the TV miniseries, precisely because it had the restrictions of having to be for a general audience. It couldn’t go deep, so making another PG version of ‘It’ was out of the question.”

Fine. But now comes the scariest, and perhaps most unexpected, thing of all. “It” opens this weekend to predictions the movie will gross more than $60 million at North American theaters. That’s a lot for a Stephen King movie; indeed, no horror film or September release has ever debuted that high. While the want-to-see for “It” certainly justifies optimism — in March, the film set a record for most views of a trailer, 197 million, online in one day — there might also be a desperate speculation inflating those numbers.

As the first major studio release following Hollywood’s most disastrous box office summer in a decade, “It” now bears the burden, in some folks’ minds, of saving the movie industry.

“We’re not expecting anything. We’re superstitious people!” jokes, sort of, Seth Grahame-Smith, one of the film’s producers. “Look, if I’m being honest, it does affect you. … To me, I just want to be well-received, that’s the most important thing. Box office would be great.”

“We spent so much time getting the script right and the film right, and for us having it well-received is probably the most important thing — other than getting the stamp of approval from Stephen King,” adds David Katzenberg, who with producing partner Grahame-Smith has been shepherding “It” to the screen for the better part of six years. He also notes that the Master of Horror warmly approves of the movie, despite changes such as making the protagonists 1980s children rather than, as he wrote them, a generation older.

Of course, getting the film right depended a lot on casting. After thousands of young actors were tested, the Loser’s Club seems to radiate a similar, convincing kid energy from the screen to that of one of the most successful movie adaptations of a King story, “Stand by Me.”

The magnificently dorky seven are: Jaeden Lieberher (“St. Vincent,” “Midnight Special”) as stuttering Bill Denbrough, who lost his little brother to Pennywise; Finn Wolfhard of “Stranger Things” as the precocious-in-his-own-mind motormouth Richie Tozier; Sophia Lillis as the spunky, abused girl of the group, Beverly Marsh; Jack Dylan Grazer, soon to be starring in the new sitcom “Me, Myself and I,” as hypochondriac Eddie Kaspbrak; Wyatt Oleff, who plays the young Peter Quill in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, as haunted bar mitzvah boy Stanley Uris; Jeremy Ray Taylor (the upcoming “Geostorm”) as the new kid in town, Ben Hanscom; and “Hawaii Five-O” regular Chosen Jacobs as Mike Hanlon, who’s been as traumatized by loss as deeply as Bill has.

Then there was the key casting of Pennywise. When “Detroit” actor Will Poulter left the “It” project shortly after its original director, Cary Fukunaga (“Beasts of No Nation,” HBO’s “True Detective”), quit over what the producers insist were genuine creative differences, Bill Skarsgard landed the other-dimensional demon role.
“He brought a certain madness,” Muschietti says of the Swedish acting dynasty’s scion (Bill’s dad is Stellan, older brother is Alexander). “There were two qualities I saw in Bill that I wanted to build the character with: a childlike trickster side and that monster side.”

Skarsgard could also go walleyed on command, which saved a little in Pennywise special-effects work. Of which there isn’t all that much, according to the actor, despite the crazy contortions the clown creature goes through on screen.

“Most of it is fully me,” Skarsgard insists. “The only special effects are the obvious ones, like when the jaw hinges off. Otherwise, it’s all performance and makeup. Even the kill faces are prosthetics as well to some degree, the teeth and the monster mouth.”

All of which, obviously, was a lot of work.

“The first makeup test was, like, five hours,” Skarsgard reports. “I just looked at myself in the mirror throughout the whole process, seeing how he came to life. Then once I had the full makeup on, I spent quite a bit of time just with myself, either recording different things with the phone or watching myself in mirrors, seeing how different expressions played through the makeup. Also, the costume: How does it fit, how does he move, things like that.

“This is sort of the general process of doing any role, but it was so extreme with this character because everything was to the end level of fictionalization and transformation for me.”

Skarsgard also wanted to distance his version of Pennywise as far as possible from Tim Curry’s interpretation in the 1990 television production. A corollary to that involved keeping him away from the younger actors until their first scenes together were shot, hopefully to enhance the kids’ childlike terror. Didn’t quite work out as he expected.

“It was one of those things where with kids, you don’t know until you know, right?” Skarsgard shrugs with a smile. “I guess these kids were a little too old, so they were all like little actors. When we did the first take of the first time Jack, who plays Eddie, sees me, I come out of the fridge, I’m mocking his asthma and his breathing, he’s crying and gagging and I’m drooling all over him and it’s a really intense scene. Then they call ‘Cut!’ and I’m like, ‘Are you OK, Jack?’ and he’s ‘Yeah man, f-ing awesome! I love what you’re doing!’ ”

“We just caught very lucky breaks, in terms of the way the scheduling came out,” Grahame-Smith notes. “We’re 27 years after the miniseries, so it looks like we’re geniuses and we planned it. Two years ago, all of a sudden clowns and clown scares started showing up in the zeitgeist again. It had nothing to do with us. Then we cast the kid from ‘Stranger Things’ before “Stranger Things” came out. Y’know, wow, aren’t we geniuses?”

And when Fukunaga left, Muschietti had recently come off his first U.S. commercial and critical horror hit, “Mama.”

“When we met with a ton of directors after Cary dropped off, the thing that grabbed us about Andy right away was that, other people were coming in and talking about the clown and the scares, and that’s important,” Grahame-Smith recalls. “But Andy talked about the kids and the book, and being a 13-year-old in Argentina reading a translation of Stephen King’s ‘It’ and how it felt like it was his life and how he related to these kids.”

“It was the emotional elements,” the director confesses. “There’s an age when you feel love and infatuation for the first time, and they’re overpowering feelings that you never live again. I got very attached to that aspect of the story and found it terrifying, too. I was mainly concerned about translating those feelings I had when I first read the book into a movie that I would like as an adult.”

And that others would like. Lots of others. For Hollywood’s sake.

“So far people are liking it and people are very excited about watching it,” Muschietti reckons. “So I think they are going to go to the movie. Of course it’s exciting that there’s not a lot of competition around, but I don’t want to raise my expectations too much. Whatever the outcome is, I’m gonna be OK.”

Bob Straus has been covering film at the L.A. Daily News since 1989. He wouldn't say the movies have gotten worse in that time, but they do keep getting harder to love. Fortunately, he still loves them.

Join the Conversation

We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. Although we do not pre-screen comments, we reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.

If you see comments that you find offensive, please use the “Flag as Inappropriate” feature by hovering over the right side of the post, and pulling down on the arrow that appears. Or, contact our editors by emailing moderator@scng.com.